My Seat At The Algonquin Round Table

One of my dad’s best friends was the revered civil engineer Alwinus “Polla” van Niekerk. Oom Polla was a founder of Van Niekerk, Kleyn and Edwards, later VKE, which was a pioneering highway engineering partnership based in Pretoria. He graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1935. Oom Polla worked on many innovative road and highway projects and was fond of regaling us kids with the story of finding a skeleton swinging from a tree while construction was undergoing on Pretoria East’s Old Military Road.

He had a significant impact on how roads and highways are still designed and constructed in South Africa. Oom Polla attended advanced professional training in soil mechanics in the United States before the Second World War and brought back the knowledge he gained there to great success locally. 

My dad and Polla were avid if average golfers and I enjoyed caddying for my dad and listening to all their stories. One of their four ball partners on their always-on 07:00 tee-off on a Saturday morning at Pretoria Country Club was Carel J. Grove, or “Pip” to his friends. He was also a civil engineer, younger than Polla and was a load of fun to be around.

The group (almost) never cancelled their 18-hole round, winter or summer, rain or shine. In the low-lying Waterkloof valley of the Pretoria Country Club course, things can get pretty freezing and recall regularly literally caddying on ice.  At the halfway house stop after the first nine holes, Oom Polla would buy me a “Brown Cow”, consisting of Coke and milk, a treat I always looked forward to.

Another fierce passion shared by my dad and Oom Polla was rugby. Great Northern Transvaal (now the Blue Bulls) fans both, Polla secured four of the best premium season seats at Loftus Versfeld rugby stadium, just above the player exit and right on the halfway line. I was always invited and am grateful to have eventually inherited these seats from my dad and Oom Polla.

But what does this winding tale have to do with where I am staying on my first stopover in New York next week? Oom Polla loved America and visited often. He married a wonderful America lady, whose lineage could be traced back to James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote The Last of the Mohicans. Oom Polla only drove Cadillacs, specially imported, left-hand drive models which fascinated us kids no end.

He was a lifelong fan of The New Yorker magazine and regularly brought issues back that he passed on to my dad and then me. I loved it from the first instance I read an issue as a youngster in high school. The quirky writing, the funny cerebral cartoons, the Goings on About Town. I was living the dream, through the pages of this wondrous compendium of all things Big Apple. Oom Polla also brought back issues of MAD Magazine, which put me well ahead of my classmates in being in the know about whatever was cutting in the world of satirical comedy in the States.

In The New Yorker I read about Harold Ross, its founder with his wife Jane Grant and his membership of the infamous Algonquin Round Table. This group of literary influencers, if not creators,  met every day for lunch at the Algonquin hotel on 59 West 44th Street and included luminaries such as Dorothy Parker, Tallulah Bankhead, Noël Coward, Harpo Marx and others.

Over many issues I became fascinated with the rich history and remarkable impact of the magazine, that lasts to this day. In fact, my early, youthful reading of The New Yorker and MAD, eventually lead to my own professional career in publishing magazine media myself, here at the southern tip of Africa.

And I’ve dreamt for a long time about visiting The Algonquin hotel too. Thus, when I started planning my upcoming journey a year ago, I was keen to look for specials I could afford and low and behold, one came up for exactly the right time. I booked my lowest rate room, paid and yes, dear reader, early next week come find me at The Blue Bar, reminiscing about brown cows and the love of freshly printed magazines.

Side Note

When my then fellow magazine publisher and since 15+ years ago my co-founder of Twisted Toast Digital, CEO Kim Browne and I published MagFocus, South Africa’s Magazine About Magazines back in the day, we ran a regular feature called American Originals. We interviewed the who’s who of the US magazine media business.

I was delighted to be able to arrange an interview with the then managing editor of The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg at the end of 1995, for the first in the Originals series. He spoke about The Algonquin Round Table and Harold Ross in our interview.